


in ravenclaw someone is always awake

by actualmuseofspace



Series: they moved forward, my heart died [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Homesickness, Ravenclaw, The Golden Trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 14:12:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16683136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualmuseofspace/pseuds/actualmuseofspace
Summary: "They say in Ravenclaw, someone is always awake."She doesn't know who told her, and she doesn't know why it's so, she just knows that there is a place where she would not be alone.





	in ravenclaw someone is always awake

"They say in Ravenclaw, someone is always awake," says Hermione. She looks to one side. If she had been let into the tower, by someone, she might've seen the desks with stains from sleepy hands knocking over bottles of inconvenient ink. Hermione wonders if she is supposed to be that person.

Harry spends his whole life focusing on something else. He drifts, staring across the table to whoever he cannot have. Sometimes, he is brave enough to chase after it. He makes the same faces at Cedric, at Cho, at Draco, something between fascination and wonder and wishing for something he wasn’t supposed to have. Hermione wonders if it is bravery that makes him look, or if it is the part of him the wishes to be known as the boy who did more than live?

Hermione notices these things. Like her ink-stained hands, the ballpoint pens she smuggles a box of in every year, the sweaters bearing tags like "Limited Too" that her mother buys every winter when she misses her daughter, she finds the things that don't belong where they are placed.

Ron spends his whole life focusing on what he thinks has been done before. He longs for the accomplishments of his siblings, and maybe he did want Lavender and Hermione, but he doesn't know how to be the first to do something, so he pushes them away instead. They're not safe because he doesn't know how not to copy, and therefore he doesn’t know how to cope.

Hermione notices these things. Like her looping gs, the spiral bound notebooks she can't bring herself to take notes in, the robes she tailors the hems of herself because her mother doesn't understand the fabric and won't pay for a tailor, she notices things that almost make a pattern.

Hermione spends her whole life focusing on the abstraction of it. She looks at the raw data, traces what everyone else does as they do it, trying to make predictions out of the data she doesn't have yet. She ought to have glasses, for the amounts of times she looks to push up her forehead when what she thought she understood doesn't line up.

Hermione notices these things. Like her always-off astrology charts, the trainers she runs in over her muggle summers, the way she ties her tie better than Ron who has four older brothers but still has a mother who ties them all before the school year starts, she notices things that only act like they are regular.

If in Ravenclaw someone is always awake, that means you are never the first to wake up. Hermione does not dream of the nights her father used to wake her up to look at the stars, bringing her hot chocolate and telling her of the meteor showers, how they chase around the sun and melt and reform. She does not dream of the mornings her mother made her waffles with peanut butter chips on top, gooey and warm and not too sweet. 

She doesn’t dream of these things and she doesn’t dream of going to a muggle school and studying math and chemistry and all the things she once thought she would always do, and yet she wishes, on the mornings her dreams are too close, that she didn't always wake up first.

\--

She was supposed to be in Ravenclaw, the Sorting Hat told her so. He said it and she didn't listen, and he said only the brave ignore wise counsel and she's foolish enough to be brave so she can't be smart enough. Still, an eleven-year-old's brain is powerful. She was supposed to be in Ravenclaw, the Sorting Hat told her so.

An eleven-year-old needs to believe in something in the nights when they are all alone and they can write to their parents but their parents can't write back. It's not the Grangers' fault - they didn't know their daughter was going to be whisked away to a wizarding school when they found a flat entirely inappropriate for holding an owl. They didn't know wizardry existed.

Hermione passes all of her classes, but she still has a heartache where her parents would be that she can't get passed. No one else seems to have that problem. No one else seems to stare at pictures of their parents before they go to sleep - no one else seems to even have pictures. They found hers strange, still and dead-like. She whispers goodnight to the picture frame every night because it’s all she can do.

An eleven-year-old needs to believe in something when for the first time in her life, no one around her thinks it's cool worth known the first three rows of the periodic table or all of Jupiter's moons. No one here plays hand games when they go outside, instead, they play with enchanted gimmicks that Hermione almost recognizes. There's a loneliness that doesn't go away easily.

Hermione was a curious kid. Her accidental magic was recorded by herself from the age of 8 on, and she frequently recopied her records when her handwriting got too different for it to feel consistent. She played with magnets in school and when her teacher said they were learning about electricity today, she felt right at home. Shoved into somewhere that doesn’t care about any of that, she feels lost. Hogwarts has no Chemistry Club for her learn about acids and bases at. Hogwarts has no Rocket League for a high schooler to teach her about acceleration. Hogwarts has an entirely different future than what she had pictured for herself, and she can’t quite reconcile that.

An eleven-year-old needs to believe in something when they are told no one here likes them, and they hear that they are just as strange and out of place as they felt. Something between the tears and the hurt and the pull to just run away seems to reaffirm the idea that even if they weren't supposed to be here, there was a place for them.

She’s terrified of the Mountain Troll because even though she can probably say more about it than Ron and Harry, she knows how terribly unequipped she is to fight it. That’ll be a running theme, she realizes. She can’t let go of the Muggle in her, the part of her that hunts for a solution using the world around her instead of an intangible reality. Her first instinct is always to be scared and run and hide, and maybe that's what the Sorting Hat meant when he warned her about wise counsel.

She was supposed to be in Ravenclaw, the Sorting Hat told her so. She didn't listen, because Ravenclaw felt like home, and Hermione wasn't quite ready to go home, yet. She didn't listen and the Sorting Hat made a sound that could only be a sigh, like he wished he could hug her, but knew he didn't have arms.

When he shouted, "Gryffindor!" it had the same rhythm as Ravenclaw, and Professor McGonagall seemed to realize they had unfinished business, giving them an extra second together where he could say, "Foolish girl, learn to be brave." She was supposed to be in Ravenclaw, but she could only use that to be brave and strong and away from everything she ever knew.

\--

Because she is smart and wise and not quite as brave as everyone else, she is very good at noticing things. Like everyone in Gryffindor is not quite as brave as everyone else. Harry has too much ambition to think about the greater good; Ron cares too much about everyone to be brave when it is needed. She stays up late into the night doing work, wondering if there is a place where she is not alone.

She has to be smart because smart is her value here. She understands that her place in the narrative - in Harry's narrative - is to be smart. Her job is to know the answers. Her job is to get straight As, or whatever they call it here, and to never say, "I didn't get enough sleep," or "I miss when my books were thin and printed the ending on the back cover."

Smart is something she knows how to be.

She has always been smart. She has made it through her SATs with flying colors - she remembers, before the letter got there, her parents whispering if they could afford to put her in a higher level school. Smart is where she feels safe.

It’s hard to be wise here, though. She doesn’t think to use her wand to light a fire at the Devil’s snare. How could she? Her mother didn’t like her using matches or lighters when they lit candles at home.

She wasn’t ever very wise. It’s a hard thing to be, for an eleven going on twelve year old who reads books with big words. She can understand the words, but a part of her knows she doesn't know what they mean.

Hogwarts makes her grow up fast. She learns the word “mudblood” and wonders if she should tell her parents. When she goes home for the summer, she reads. She goes to the library and reads and reads and reads, finding history books much more interesting.

Hogwarts makes her grow up fast, because before she left her mother still put her to bed each night, and in a house full of brave idiots, she hides her stuffed cat under her covers and bides her time until she can buy a real one.

When she realizes that it was house elves who made her bed every day, she wants to cry, not just because she has an intimate knowledge with slavery, but also because they always put the cat behind the other pillows, even though she knows that other girls brought stuffed animals too.

She grows up fast, but she can’t learn how to be brave, so instead, she keeps noticing, and she keeps wishing she wasn’t quite so alone.

\--

Because she is Hermione Granger, she reads books while she eats breakfast and takes on the responsibility of being the responsible one. She doesn't mind holding Ron and Harry back by the collars of their shirts because she understands that this was her fate from when she was young and foolish. She holds them back and she wonders if she had taken one step sideways if she would've been the one being held back.

She might be the most sensible Gryffindor she knows, but most Ravenclaws aren't half as daring as her. She assumes that it's exposure because she knows when she came to Hogwarts, she wouldn't have lit a teacher's robes on fire or thought herself bold enough to solve a puzzle with death on the line.

It's scary, the idea that she could change so much. Some irrational part of her worries she'll go home and her parents won't know who she is anymore. It's the part of her that worries she will change so much they'll feel out of touch with her own daughter.

So she reads books during breakfast. They might be reporting honestly on things she never thought could be true, but the written word is consistent. It takes the same liberties, and wraps her in familiar rhythms. Like a heartbeat, the pages turn just when they need to. She's careful not to let food get on the pages, even though her tablemates are chaotic and unpredictable.

From the second Ron and Harry came after her and fought a troll for her, she knew where she was destined to be. Later, Ron would mention he felt he couldn’t not be her friend after that, but she always thought she was making quite a conscious choice. She could choose to take this olive branch, or risk alienation forever. The olive branch implied she would accept responsibility for two eleven-year-olds foolish enough to chase after a mountain troll. The alienation implied she was okay with being worse than nobody.

She could accept responsibility. She could help them study for their tests, and bail them out when they failed anyway. She could offer them her notes, even though it went against her morals. Then somehow, it turned into friendship. She didn't want them to fail, and she had dug herself into a hole.

Eventually, she stopped wondering how to dig them out. She's Hermione Granger, and that's not changing. Her parents will always recognize her until she makes it so they don't. She will keep reading, because at least her books will always run left to right, top to bottom, until the day she finds the languages they don't. She’ll accept her fate because she recognizes it went from being between a rock and a hard place to where she wanted to be.

\--

They say in Ravenclaw, someone is always awake. Hermione doesn’t know if this is supposed to hold true in every house. 

She knows in Slytherin, they don’t talk in the common rooms, but not because they don’t care about each other, because even in the summer their fingers feel like ice from the cold. She knows Harry has ambition and dreams and he wants things he can’t have, but he’s not enough to go after them, and Hermione thinks that’s a good thing.

She knows in Hufflepuff, they always have snacks on the table, but they don’t think about the slave labor it comes from. Even kindness is limited to what they perceive as worthy of it. They are badgers, protective of and kind to their own, but distrusting of everyone else. She knows Ron wishes he was there, sometimes, wishes he was surrounded by people who didn't care if he never was brave enough to say what he thinks.

She knows in Gryffindor, they dare each other to do stupid things, but not because they don't care about each other, because none of them really belong, and they care about each other so much they want a chance to prove to be brave.

Hermione says, “I dare you to walk away from this dare,” and no one can ever succeed it, because if they walk away they remember how they think they aren’t enough, and if they don’t, they hear how they are, anyway.

Hermione says, “I dare you to say who you miss,” and no one can ever succeed, because if they speak, they admit how much they miss their families, but if they don’t, they fail the dare and that’s bad enough.

Hermione says, “I dare you to stop playing,” and she walks away. People stop asking her to play dare - or - dare because she’s tired of saving people from doing stupid, dangerous things, and on the nights her whole year is gathered in the common room, she hides in her dorm and finishes her homework early.

They say in Ravenclaw, someone is always awake, she says under her breath, a mantra she doesn't think anyone notices. Harry says, "He told me I could be great," and Ron says, "He said I had too much heart," and Hermione thinks maybe she is terribly alone, but she is alone with other people who are alone, and that's not everything, but at least it's something.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> The idea for this is that Gryffindors are so because they choose themselves - they have to want to be brave because being brave is a choice. The Golden Trio represent each other house inside Gryffindor, with Hermione being Ravenclaw, Harry being Hufflepuff (controversial choice, I know, but the boy is too damn loyal), and Ron being Slytherin (anyone else remember how in the mirror of Erised, he saw himself holding every award possible?).  
> There will be three more main works in this series - one for Harry, one for Ron, and a final one to bring it all together. The next fic will be "before the dragons," about Harry, but I don't have a set publishing date for that yet.  
> "terrified" is still the next fic I plan to have out, ASAP.


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